Break Through to Your Inner Shakespeare With the Director of ‘A Different Man’

The dark comedy A Different Man was a standout at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Writer/director Aaron Schimberg’s third feature is a complex tale of identity, image, and insecurity, with incredibly earnest and complicated characters.

Sebastian Stan, now something of a Sundance darling, plays Edward, an aspiring actor. He undergoes a medical procedure to change his appearance, initially loving the way people now look at him and treat him. But when Adam Pearson’s charming Oswald shows up and innocently steals the spotlight, Edward starts to doubt himself.

A Different Man will have a wide release on Oct. 4. Ahead of the film’s limited release on Sept. 20, we chatted with Schimberg about his screenwriting process, the “right” way to write, and the challenges of the film.

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Editor’s note: The following conversation has been edited for clarity.

No Film School: I’d love to know how you approached this project in the development phase, how you came at it as a screenwriter.

Aaron Schimberg: A lot of it was a response to my previous film, after I made Chained for Life. I felt in some ways that that film was marginalized for its subject matter, which was disability and disfigurement, and I felt maybe this subject matter is box office poison, or something.

So I said to my wife, “Don’t let me make another film about the subject for now,” even though it’s an important subject to me. I have a cleft palate. It’s important to me, it’s personal to me, but it’s like suicide to try to make films about this.

I started thinking about some other subjects and some other script ideas I had, but I’m stubborn. I kept getting pulled back to this. And so I started to think, “Well, okay, I’ll do this, but I need to think of a way to make it less uncomfortable for an audience. I need to think of a way to make this palatable on some level and more intriguing instead of off-putting.”

Which I think is what happened with Chained for Life. Even though I think when people see Chained for Life, generally they like it, but the very idea of it was something that nobody really wanted to touch.

So I was thinking about this, and A Different Man grew out of this kind of thinking. “How can I try again and make this work for people?”

Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson in A Different ManA24

NFS: Edward is a great protagonist. He’s a complicated man, he doesn’t always do things that are the most likable. How, as a writer, do you go about crafting a character that complex?

Schimberg: For one thing, I have this rule where I only know what my characters do or say. I don’t create backstories for them unless it comes up naturally in the film, and I just sort of let them act.

Some people have said I’m looking down on Edward, or that he’s being punished for this choice that he made to have this treatment. And I don’t think about it that way at all. Edward comes from me, and I’m not saying it’s autobiographical, but I’m taking some part of myself and turning it into a character, and I have nothing but sympathy for him.

But that doesn’t mean he’s always going to make the right decisions. He can only make the decisions that he can make and he’s only going to do what he knows how to do.

And I think it’s strongly suggested that he’s had a lot of trauma in his life and he doesn’t know how to break out of certain habits. I think that he is extremely self-conscious, because everybody is making him self-conscious, or they have in the past. And so even when he takes this treatment, he hasn’t been trained to behave any differently. I don’t think of him as unethical or immoral. I just set him on a path, and things get thrown in his way. He reacts the only way he knows how.

NFS: Is it that you come up with this character and then just let them explore a potential story? How does that come to you in the writing?

Schimberg: A little bit of both. I had a story. I don’t start writing until I know the overall plot of the film. I knew that essentially we had this guy, he was going to be cured of his disfigurement, and then he was going to meet somebody else who had the same disfigurement as him. And then I added this idea about the play, and they were going to be circling the same role in this play.

I had all those elements, but outside of that, I just jump in. Usually I jump in in the middle, I’ll write a scene and I’ll see who these characters are. I don’t know anything about them.

And they start talking, and they start doing things, and they mention somebody else, and then that somebody else must be part of the story. I really let my subconscious do the work, and then I will go off in any direction that I want. I also refer back to the original arc of the story. I try to combine them in some way that’s coherent.

I don’t want to set rules or limits on what I’m doing, but I also I’m trying to give myself limitations to work within.

Adam Pearson and Aaron Schimberg behind the scenes of A Different ManA24

NFS: Do you have a challenge that you faced on the production? How did you overcome it?

Schimberg: There were plenty of challenges. One thing is, as usual—for me, anyway—we had 22 days to shoot, which is not very much. It was, for me, the most ambitious shoot of my life and not enough time to do it.

This film came together so quickly after Sebastian came aboard. We got funded, and then we were up and running basically. And we had a few weeks to make this happen, including having to hire not only the whole crew and cast, but also figuring out about the prosthetics that Edward would be wearing.

I think our lack of time in many ways made our lives more difficult. But at the same time, I kind of liked it that way because there was no time to think, really. And there was no time to let it fall apart. It was going to happen, and we had to make it happen somehow. Most people said, “Twenty-two days isn’t enough to do this.” But I had to find a way to make it work.

It was going to happen whether we were able to do it or not. That’s what we had. We had the script that was however long. So I just had to make it work, and that was the challenge.

NFS: Do you have any advice for aspiring screenwriters?

Schimberg: I went to USC for screenwriting. My general advice is to not worry about the “right” way to do things, and to trust your own process and instinct. I don’t think any sort of methodology, screenwriting methodology, Save the Cat or Syd Field—if that’s important to you and you get some use out of it, then great—but there are no rules.

I, for instance, am incredibly lazy, and I’m incredibly scatterbrained until my script is done and it’s coherent. Up until that moment, I think that it’s a total piece of shit. I look at what I have, and it’s a mess, and I feel an utter despair about it until I put the final period on it. And somehow it’s turned into a polished thing.

So I’m really giving myself advice. I give myself this advice every time because I despair the whole time while I’m doing it, and yet in the end, it tends to work out if I just keep working at it.

Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson, Renate Reinsve in A Different ManA24

NFS: I think that’s a very common feeling for writers. It’s just, “This is bad. Why am I even doing this?”

Schimberg: It’s the hardest part because you’re staring at a blank page and the only thing standing between you and writing Moby Dick or Shakespeare is you. There’s no excuse. Anything else, there are limitations upon it, but your own limitations are the only thing that is keeping you from writing the greatest thing ever written. And that’s a very frightening feeling.

You have to fight your way through it, even if it’s delusional.

NFS: What about on the director side? Do you have any advice there? It seems like you’re very good about working quickly and working in those indie spaces.

Schimberg: I think directors should schedule the films themselves, schedule the shoots themselves. I think that’s something that has really helped me.

I always have a line producer give me a schedule, and I look at it, and then I throw it away. Because only you know how long you want to take with a certain scene. Only you know if you’re not going to have enough time and you need to go back to the script and cut something, and what that thing is going to be, or what you have to conflate, or what you have to rearrange to make it work for you.

It’s very empowering to create that schedule yourself.